“We are deep in sorrow… As a community, we’re always perceived as sort of resilient, but that resiliency comes from… being years in survival mode. And I know that my community has very much survived, is surviving violence on a daily basis.” – Isa Noyola
Last week, Democracy NOW! featured TLC Director of Programs, Isa Noyola, in its coverage of the Orlando shooting, “Activist: Latinx LGBTQ Community & Its Stories of Survival Should Be at Center of Orlando Response”. In this segment, Isa discusses the impact of this tragedy on an already vulnerable Latinx immigrant community and the social, political and economic factors that lead to such violence.
“And I think that it is a moment for the broader LGBT movement and for society to really think about how our Latinx, Latina, Latino communities have been surviving. And the fact of the matter is that through state violence, through detention centers, through the immigration process, through the journey of arriving to this country, that my community is suffering at every turn.” – Isa Noyola
Isa also appeared on MyPeoples TV’s Episode 6: The Future We Want along with guests, Kendrick Sampson, Greg Palast, Sam Jay, Rosario Dawson, Taz Ahmed, Francisca Valenzuela, Daniel Leon-Davis, and Nneoma Akubuilo. Isa spoke about the specificity of the harm that happened in Orlando, that has historically been perpetrated against people of color spaces, and the violence that is still being condoned even as we talk about the shooting. She reminds us that there are many undocumented, monolingual, and undocumented families living a reality in which they are not able to access and/or navigate the resources that are currently pouring into Orlando, and calls for the media, the government, funders, organizations, and individuals to listen to and center the voices of trans people of color.
You can read TLC’s official statement from the day of the shooting here.